So, here’s the thing; I am stalking that rarest of game, the agent who actually believes in literary fiction and in my ability to write it (and sell it).

For some years now, it had been just Bob the Agent and me. We laughed together, we cried together, and, once, a few years, ago, we went through an actual duel between two different publishers for one of my books. I sat there in one publisher’s office with my sunglasses on, afraid that my eyes would give me away, as Bob nudged and noodled, trying to get the best deal.

How were we to know, like the husband and wife whose trip to Paris was their marriage’s highlight, that it would never be the same again. When we ran out of the publishers’ and into a coffeehouse around the corner, each flushed from the meeting as much as from the running, sat down over lattes picked apart the two offers on the table. We came to a conclusion, signed the deal and moved forward. While the book that came out of that deal is still in print a decade later, and still selling, it was never the same again for me or for Bob the Agent.

Over the years, we grew apart. He stayed true to himself and his attention to nonfiction books in the category of health and healing. I strayed, I must admit, ever more longing for fiction, fiction, beautiful fiction. Ever more wanting to not have to double check spellings and dates and come up with appendices to support the material in the book.

Bob the Agent is getting older now, doesn’t want to work very much, and who can blame him–so he’s pickier about what he takes on. And I am pickier myself, wanting to limit my nonfiction work to few and far between. So, while we remain good friends and a solid team, from time to time, our days as a hard-working team are now largely behind us. Especially since, when it comes to fiction, I can’t help but think: If not now, then when?

So now, in the middle of my life, I am out trying to get dates with agents. Sometimes I send them sweet query letters, filled with titles of books that they have sold or glowing accounts of their dedication to their authors and to the Art of Writing in general. In those times, I am quite sure that my Paper Armada of queries will yield results. And it does sometimes, some agents and I have dated briefly before we (they, usually) determine that we are not right for each other.

Sometimes I enter contests, quite sure that if my short story wins, it will carry with it an agent’s business card. But not yet, my sweets, not yet.

Now I am planning other plans, as I become aware that one could spend the next fifty years honing a query letter until it is so sharp that it cuts, and still come away empty-handed. (It doesn’t help that all too many agents now read–or, to me more honest–have their 23-year-old interns read incoming material just long enough to find an excuse not to work with it, which is sort of the opposite of the way it used to be, when readers read to find a reason why someone should pay attention to a particular piece of writing.)

Plan A right now is what I think of as the “Lana Turner Method.” Four younger readers, Lana Turner was once a movie goddess; she was known as the Sweater Girl, because she wore such tight sweaters and because she wore them so well. Legend has it that Lana was discovered in Schwab’s Drug Store in downtown Hollywood, where she was just sitting at the counter drinking a refreshing Pepsi. She looked so blonde lovely in her sweater set that an agent came right up to he and said, “Miss, have you ever considered being a movie star?” She, as a matter of fact, had, and so they signed a contract and she soon was onscreen in full technicolor. (If you haven’t seen her in Imitation of Life–well, what’s stopping you?)

So Plan A is this; be not where the agents should be, which is in the office looking through all those query letters, but be where the agents actually are–which is a certain new book is to be believed, is in hotel rooms all over Manhattan coked out of their minds. So let’s hope that that is not the case. Instead, let’s hope that they are at nice dinner parties in the Connecticut Hills or the Hudson Valley, since the Hamptons are not what they used to be. Let’s hope they are, as Bob the Agent was, stalking classes at places like the Open Center in Manhattan looking for new talent. (It was there that Bob the Agent caught my act as I was teaching my heart out on the subject of holistic health. After class, he called me and asked if I had ever thought of writing a book. I had.)

So Plan A is to be where they are, where those dreamy, scrawny bespectacled agents are. Since I don’t want to teach holistic health any more and don’t want to write nonfiction any longer, it may be harder to find their hunting ground. But my sweater is tight, my man-boobs are held high and I am on the prowl for that perfect literary other half.

A friend emailed me today to say that she was present for the launch of my new blog today and that she thought it very exciting, except that one of my posts had been so long that she hadn’t been able to finish it. (Maybe she was reading in the bathroom–she didn’t explain.)

Truth of it is that I tend to think that you can never use too many words. Maybe this is because when I first was working as a writer–I was the movie critic for a small weekly paper (a paper so small that I had to pay for my own ticket) in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I was paid by the word. As I remember, it was only a nickel a word, but, as I soon learned, if you can be longwinded enough, it adds up.

And so began a life-long struggle with words. I’ve tried weeding, hoeing, but they just keep growing back. I can even claim to be the only person who can read Henry James and suggest just one more adjective in a given sentence.

But, I get it. I understand. Although it is better for everyone involved if I blog instead of tweet, I will endeavor to shorten, tighten and otherwise restrict the prose from here on in, sweeties, so things should be better from here on out.

As careful readers will notice and know, the phrase “ars gratia artis” while written in Latin was not, in fact, a model philosophy that Roman writers followed. It was, in fact, the latinized motto for MGM pictures, the motion picture studio that dominated Hollywood in the ’30s and ’40s.

A actual idea of art for art’s sake being enough, that art needed not to exist for any reason other than TO exist is, of course, French, what else could it be? The phrase “l’art pour l’art” was popularized in 19th century France. It has been credited to a number of people, but most often to Theophile Gautier, although the idea behind the phrase pops up from time to time, place to place.

It perhaps originated in ancient Greece where, without saying so in so many words, the culture understood that art itself was sufficient and need not serve any purpose other than simple being.

And so, as I am trying to point out, writing at its highest form, at the point at which it is True Art, need do nothing more than mean. It need not educate, elucidate, innovate or pontificate. It needs to only communicate.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the new HBO series Treme yet. It just finished its first season of ten episodes, but it is still On Demand on many cable system. If you haven’t seen it, please stop reading this, go watch the ten hours of material and then come back and finish up here.

Treme is named of a neighborhood in New Orleans. Like much of the city, it has a bohemian vibe. The setting is just a few months after Katrina, when the city was especially struggling to get back to something approaching normal. Hospitals were still closed, schools had yet to re-open. Many thousands who wanted to get back to their homes were unable to because of lack of houses. FEMA trailers still seemed like a blessing.

Music fills the episodes of this series the way it fills the streets of New Orleans. As the episodes unfold, the well-meaning volunteers who have come to New Orleans are replaced by the first wave of tourists, who have come as much to see what was destroyed as to celebrate what remains. And so music is once more a business–as the restaurants and hotels open again they must be filled with the jazz that is the city’s best known (along with the food) product.

And so musicians gather in impromptu bands, friends calling friends and friends of friends in order to put together enough musicians to play a gig on any given night in any given club or restaurant. Musicians are also playing days on street corners, entertaining the tourists with the expected songs: When the Saints Go Marching In, Basin Street Blues, etc. And the tourists, entertained and amused, throw coins in the musician’s outstretched hats and toddle off down the street in the heat and the humidity.

Now, this may so far sound like a review of what turned out to be an excellent television show by the folks who also created The Wire, but it is something more geared to those of us gathered here at Agentquery–the unhappy masses of writers, yearning to breathe free.

Because the musicians are being used here in place of the writers that we are, although we, too, stand all too often with outstretched hands, begging for coins.

While watching the show, the parallel came to me. How the musicians who played on the streets during the day played in the clubs at night, those same songs over and over again, all for the tourists. But then, when the club closed, and after they got a little something to eat and drink at last, the musicians did not hurry home. Instead, they lit up, sat back, had a laugh (often at the expense of the tourists) and then, inevitably, one of them would dip down a hand and bring up an instrument.

And so the music began. The real music. The music that could be only be played when the tourists had gone back to their air conditioned rooms and were sleeping the heavy sleep that walking too much, drinking too much and eating too much will bring.

And so the music began. But this music, it notes unexpected, improvised, its rhythms the rhythm of the heartbeat, the air paddling in the lungs, the sexual surge, it tunes tuneless, intricate, resounding, breath-taking even in the literal sense, as the musicians dared each other, tested each other and, finally, wore each other out so that they, too, could rest.

They could not go home, you see, without playing this, their real music. They could not go home if they had not reminded themselves of the language of music as they really spoke it, as it echoed in their hearts and ears, as if flew from lips and fingers and hearts and lungs. Not to be reminded of this would be to fall prey to the notion that the music that was played for the tourists was the only music that they could create, that their talent and passion could go no further. Without the reminder they might in time be fooled and allow themselves to be redefined, not by the music that drove their lives, but, instead, by the songs, those expected hardly-heard songs that got the tourist to part with a bit of money, sometimes only because it was expected of them (the begrudged quarter) and, worse, sometimes because the tourist at hand, plastic beads around their neck no matter the time of year, thought–actually believed–that this was the best that they could do.

And I realized in that moment how much of my life I have spent writing for the tourists, how many springs I have written variations on “Ten Remedies for Summer Ailments”, or “Notes on Clearing Up Poison Ivy”. I thought of all the times in which the only challenge I faced as a writer was to come up with that needed quote, or to meet ridiculous deadline. And I thought of how seldom I had pushed myself to the limits of myself, so that I could sleep, exhausted, knowing that I could communicate in a language that was deeper, richer, more enchantingly remote from the commonweal and yet universally pertinent.

And I thought of Christopher Isherwood in his diaries, and how, even after he had written so many fine things, he had come to the conclusion that it was time for “no more toys, only tools” and how often I still settled for the toy surprises that tourists give.

The trap of the writer’s life is that, like the musicians, we have to earn a living. They play weddings, we write the same things (with the required “different slant) on a regular basis. All that is for mass consumption, for the tourists.

The worse trap is, unlike musicians, most of us work alone. Therefore, it is up to us to try to break through the walls of easy language/easy resolution and move beyond what we thought, until that very moment, that we were capable of. Hitting that high note that empties the lungs, reddens the face, and leaves us staggered and dizzy as we stare at the blipblipblip of the computer screen aghast and amazed as what we have just written.

This is not to say don’t write for the tourists, the evil, overweight, ADD-addled tourists. This is to say don’t just write for them. When you dream your dreams of being that greatest of all novelists, most revered of all poets, the memoirist with the worst possible story to tell (I had a crazy mother, was a drug mule, a prostitute, a tight-rope walker, head of a small island nation, a toothless dentist, and a drug-addicted literary agent, all at the same time, and I lived to tell this tale…) just say to yourself “If not now, when?” Don’t worry over agents or publishers or internet platforms or rent or love or the fact that your beloved daughter is selling matches on the street on New Year’s Eve. Worry over the fact that, if you write just for the tourists long enough, the other words, the better words, the words with lip-gloss and minty, minty breath will leave you and go and find another author, one who writes No Matter What. One who is old enough in spirit to remember a time, in ancient Rome, when they knew the truth about the creative storm within and the need to release it to the world. Art, for the Romans, was never created for the sake of some tourist from Thebes. No, they carved the truth of it in the walls, so they would not forget (and Leo the Lion roared it off the screen at MGM–but that’s another story for another time): ars gratia artis. Art for art’s sake.